Nepali founders raise $3M seed for AI explainer-video startup Lamina Labs

What's the deal? Nepali founders Sudip Rokaya and Kartikesh Mishra have raised $3 million in seed funding for their San Francisco startup, Lamina LabsDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →.

The duo met as students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Their company builds generative video tools.

The backing comes from Y Combinator, a top US startup accelerator.

Lamina's first product, Simi, generates whiteboard-style explainer videos from a text prompt. It is named after Rokaya's home village, Simikot, in remote northwestern Nepal.

Why now? Rokaya, a visual learner inspired by maths YouTuber 3Blue1Brown, first tried to automate an existing animation library called ManimDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →. But the tool predated the large language model (LLM) era and proved too hard to adapt.

The breakthrough came while he was stuck in a biology class he disliked, searching for an AI tool to help him learn through video. He found none worked well.

Sensing an opportunity, Rokaya dove into research in late October 2025, skipping classes. He concluded the process could be sped up 50 times while producing better results.

He showed it to Mishra, who had worked at two San Francisco startups. Impressed, Mishra signed on as chief technical officer.

What could go wrong? The field is crowded. Other funded startups were already chasing the same problem, which is why the pair abandoned their first idea.

In a market where solutions get copied fast, Lamina will need a defensible edge to stay ahead.

The signal: Lamina is positioning itself as deterministic animation infrastructure for the EdTech sector, a defensible niche that could set it apart in a crowded generative-video field. Y Combinator's backing gives the early-stage startup the accelerator network and credibility that often helps founders convert a single product like Simi into broader infrastructure plays.

Read more: Nepali Times